Summary Of Letter From Birmingham Jail

The “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was written by Martin Luther King Jr. He wrote this on April 16, 1963, after he was arrested and imprisoned for protesting the injustice for African Americans in Birmingham, Alabama. Although violence in the midst of racism and segregation was prominent during the 1960s, King beseeches to his white counterparts for support of his nonviolent resistance plan.

Martin Luther King Jr. was an African American male who had many titles. He is mainly recognized for his dedication to the Civil Rights Movement back in the 1960s. He committed his life to the well-being and equality of his African American people. King actually was first known as a Baptist preacher in Alabama although he was born in Atlanta, Georgia in

He was arrested for protesting the violence against the African Americans in the city. The court stated that he was not permitted to protest again within the city limit of Birmingham because of prior protests that had taken place elsewhere. He began to write to his fellow clergymen to gain their support to fight against this treatment of blacks nationally. This letter soon got the interest of, not only the clergymen, but also the people of the world in general. This brings up the case of audience invoked and the audience addressed. What the readers know for a fact is that King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail” was written directly for his fellow clergymen. These men are all in King’s work field through the church. They are the audience addressed because King openly assigned their names on the letter. However, there is another audience that reads the paper, which is the audience invoked. The invoked audience are the people that catch interest in the letter, but it really was not for them. The people that read this letter and are not clergymen, are the invoked audience. This letter caught the eye of many people and still does. The letter stated many some things that made it important for everyone to read this. The fact that it gave ways to change the hardship for blacks in Birmingham, made all blacks and whites who were against racism want to read and help make a change themselves. Some may

Edward Berry gave a quote in his essay that stated how important this letter really was. “…Martin Luther King’s ‘Letter from Birmingham Jail’ is widely recognized as the most important single document of the civil rights era in the United States” (Berry, 2005, p. 1). This quote opens Berry’s analysis and argument of his paper. He and many others in the same field feel similar. Because of the fact that King uses so many different ways to invoke the readers makes it so much more important to the advancement America have made as a country